Post Mortem

Eight o’clock, my rotation partner and I walk through the green doors. In front of us, the body of an old man is perched on top of a stainless steel cart. Next to the cart is a sink with a spray hose and a stainless steel bench with a cutting board. To the right is a bench with various sharp tools designed to cut through any organic material. The man on the cart died suddenly last week at home. Today the pathologist is going to perform a autopsy and try to find out the cause of death. In Queensland, all autopsies have to be witnessed by the police, so two police officers are also present.

In walks the pathologist. We exchange greetings and he starts working. Wielding a scalpel, he expertly makes an incision from the man’s jawline, down his neck, through the middle of his chest and abdomen, all the way through to the pubis. As he peels back the chest tissues and abdominal wall, the room is immediately permeated with the smell of three days of decomposition, despite the refrigeration. I look around: the smell does not even register with the pathologist, my rotation partner and the police officers start breathing through their mouths. Luckily for me, I am not bothered by the smell. Having peeled back the man’s chest, the pathologist takes a bolt cutter and snaps the ribs one by one until he can lift up the whole front rib cage off the chest like popping the top off a tin can. Next, he frees all the internal organs from the chest and abdominal cavities, slices the tongue from the mouth through the chin, and in one fell swoop, picks up the whole collection of internal organs from tongue to anus and everything in between and lays it down on the bench. The pathologist’s assistant picks up the oscillating saw and goes to town on the skull. In no time, the brain, covered in its fine web of arteries, is presented to the pathologist.

Each organ is weighed, catalogued, sliced, and examined for abnormalities. In the mean time, the pathologist’s assistant sews up the body, leaving a small opening in the abdomen into which he puts a plastic bag. All the chopped up organs are returned to the body into the bag, like so much table scrap being swept down the garbage disposal. The whole procedure is cold and clinical, without any emotional attachment. The person on the table was someone’s father, someone’s husband, someone’s grandfather; but in here, he is just a body whose cause of death the pathologist is trying to determine.

Toward the end of the autopsy, the door to the room swings open. Another body is brought in on a steel cart. “Suicide by hanging,” announces one of the wardies, pointing to the noose still around his neck. The pathologist’s assistant takes the spray hose and cleans off the ants still crawling on the body, then pushes him into the morgue. “We’ll do a post mortem on him later to make sure it was a suicide and not a homicide,” says the pathologist.

With that, the autopsy comes to an end. We thank the pathologist and head to the ward.